My GotzeLinked api has been listed in Grand Central’s web service directory in the References: Databases category. Great.
The directory is available for syndication via web services. I think I’ll play with the WSD in-a-box kit. Look for Slashdemocracy as provider, right there next to Reuters 🙂
I nominated Atom as the Standardisation Project of the Year. Now I’ve added an Atom feed from my blog, supporting auto-discovery for those who know how to use that, and also clickable via the right menu. It’s a valid feed. Is there an authorised Atom icon? I couldn’t find one, so I made my own using Kalsey’s Button Maker.
I also added an Atom category to my links collection. Feel free to suggest more links.
Politics, greed, complexity and marketing. Could be the ingredients in a new Hollywood movie, but is actually how a bunch of experts described the current web service development. InfoWorld: Web services still challenged by standards is about the standardisation work around web services, and the two “camps”, Sun-Oracle and IBM-Microsoft.
Announcing Amager Classic’s next event on 21 September. We have Vivaldi and a fabulous new chamber ensemble on the programme, and the R�de Kro Teater as the venue, and I really look forward to this.
As for outreach and PR, I’m working with KultuNaut, which is Denmark’s biggest events calendar. It currently has around 20.000 cultural arrangements in the database. KultuNaut’s database is used by a huge number of partners and affiliates, among them the official KulturNet, Politiken (a big national newspaper) and TV2 (television), as well as many towns and cities, counties, libraries, etc. I’ve known KultuNaut’s founder and CEO Mads Gudmand-H�yer since the early days back in the mid-90s.
KultuNaut now has the ability to generate context-dependent RSS-feeds. I’ve used the feeds to create a list of classical music events on Amager, and use this on Amager Classic’s homepage. The KultuNaut feeds are in RSS 1.0. The feeds validate too. Good job, Mads.
Wiki Wiki means “fast” in Hawaiian. Wiki is also a kind of software, which has been around for a number of years and has been and still is used many places.
I have now jumped the band-wagon and have installed a wiki. This particular wiki serves a particular purpose and a particular enclosed circle of people, who are working with me in a collaborative writing process. Hence, I have password protected the wiki, and will only give access to selected participants (only qualified enterprise architects need apply).
I was shopping around for a good wiki software package. I ended up with TWiki, which so far has been great. Twiki is open source, Perl-based, and runs fine on a virtual host. It also has cool add-ons and plugins, such as the MovableTypePlugin (for blog-wikis, blikis, I suppose) and the ActionTrackerPlugin, which may be handy as a project manager’s tool.
UserLand Software has transferred ownership of its RSS 2.0 specification to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. The specification now resides at Harvard, and has been licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license. An Advisory Board has been established, whose initial members are Dave Winer, Jon Udell and Brent Simmons. It seems the board is more of a decision body than most advisory boards I know of, it having already had its first split vote.
Dan Gillmor comments:
Plainly, this move won’t cause peace to suddenly break out in the RSS format war. But equally plainly, this looks like a positive step toward some resolution of a dispute where personal pique has threatened to derail entirely appropriate professional and technological debates.
I agree that this is indeed a positive step forward. In fact, I’m tempted to say that it is a very wise step. It gives RSS a non-corporate institutional base, which is hugely important for achieving tolerant levels of acceptance in the community at large. Dave’s done the right thing.
Some would argue that it would have been better to submit the spec to a standards body (IETF, W3C, OASIS). I am not convinced that it is necessarily so. Besides the obvious question of which body to submit it to, it strikes me that it may not be critical at all having a standard that “no body” owns (“free”?).
Case settled? From the spec:
Roadmap
RSS is by no means a perfect format, but it is very popular and widely supported. Having a settled spec is something RSS has needed for a long time. The purpose of this work is to help it become a unchanging thing, to foster growth in the market that is developing around it, and to clear the path for innovation in new syndication formats. Therefore, the RSS spec is, for all practical purposes, frozen at version 2.0.1. We anticipate possible 2.0.2 or 2.0.3 versions, etc. only for the purpose of clarifying the specification, not for adding new features to the format. Subsequent work should happen in modules, using namespaces, and in completely new syndication formats, with new names.
Hold that up against the Atom/Echo/Pie roadmap. Is there any conflict between the two? As I see it, no, not really. In fact, it more seems to be more of an issue for RSS 1.0, the RDF way, which supposedly is more “semantic” than RSS 0.91-2.0. If Atom/Echo/Pie delivers just half of what it promises, it should be as semantic as even the “metast” geek would ever wish, so I’m not sure where RSS 1.0 will go. Away, it seems. Or, maybe it’ll find a niche for people who can actually get something out of it that they couldn’t get from the other formats. Heck, Userland has started supporting Trackback, so there might even be a wider support than we’ve seen so far.
The various formats will be somewhat competitive since they can be used for the same thing. But so can a Ford and a Ferrari. They’re basically just cars, and should be seen just as such, when we make up our opinions about “the big picture”. We need to see cars as well as syndication formats in their wider contexts.
If we look at standards for cars (I’m absolutely no expert here!), we can say that what really matters are the contextual standards – for example that the fuel brand is decoupled from the car brand. Add a few other contextual standards, such as envinmental constraints and security standards, but basically, the list is not, and should not be, very long, because then you end up with a 21st Century black Ford T.
Freedom of choice and a level playing field is what we want, be it with our cars, our politicians, or our syndication formats. Yet, we also have common criteria. For syndication formats, perhaps it is a good time to discuss these commonalities and the “basic requirements” that all formats must share. I can see a few such on top of my head:
What else do we need?
I have been catching up on news from META Group, and found an Analyst Insights on RSS, dated 4 June 2003: Rich Site Summary “Reloaded” as Really Simple Syndication. Bad title and too short analysis, but some interesting predictions:
By mid-2004, we believe RSS familiarity among developers will result in most enterprise content management and portal vendors announcing support of RSS, and e-mail clients and Web browsers will natively support RSS subscription management by 2005.
I think they’re right.
I wonder when META Group starts offering RSS-feeds?
An update of the W3C Working Draft on Architecture of the World Wide Web was released last week. It’s recommended reading, and worth a longer quote:
The important points of this document are categorized as follows:
Constraint
An architectural constraint is a restriction in behavior or interaction within the system. Constraints may be imposed for technical, policy, or other reasons.Design Choice
In the design of the Web, some design choices, like the names of the <p> and <li> elements in HTML, or the choice of the colon character in URIs, are somewhat arbitrary; if <par>, <elt>, or * had been chosen instead, the large-scale result would, most likely, have been the same. Other design choices are more fundamental; these are the focus of this document.Good practice
Good practice — by software developers, content authors, site managers, users, and specification writers — increases the value of the Web.Principle
An architectural principle is a fundamental law that applies to a large number of situations and variables. Architectural principles include “separation of concerns”, “generic interface”, “self-descriptive syntax,” “visible semantics,” “network effect” (Metcalfe’s Law), and Amdahl’s Law: “The speed of a system is determined by its slowest component.”Property
Architectural properties include both the functional properties achieved by the system, such as accessibility and global scope, and non-functional properties, such as relative ease of evolution, reusability of components, efficiency, and dynamic extensibility.
This is good. As co-author Tim Bray says, “this is far from finished”, but it’s good to see progress.
When we talk about the internet, “keep it simple” is a classic architectural principle (section 3.5 in IETF RFC 1958) which we should remind ourselves of more often. It’s nice to see simplicity in practice in the W3C draft. The XHTML document uses simple markup like <p class=”principle”> and <p class=”practice”> for codifying the principles and best practices. That is all Jon Udell needs to wrap up a cool XPath search experiment for visualising the principles and best practices. Nice work, Jon.
I want to do something similar in our national enterprise architecture framework. Part of the framework programme is to establish guidelines and a so-called Reference Profile (e-GIF).
Maybe we should use simple but meaningful markup when we publish our documents. I’ll try and adapt the five W3C point classes (<p class=”principle”>Interoperability</p> etc). Maybe we could invent some more classes. Say, if we chose to include RSS, a basic, simple markup system could be something like:
<p class=”migrateFrom”>RSS 0.91</p>
<p class=”use”>RSS 2.0</p>
<p class=”use”>RSS 1.0</p>
With a style sheet, class=use could be coloured green, class=migrateFrom yellow, and so on. With XPath and stuff we can get all the XML we want, of course.
The class attributes should be standardised. Maybe we should create a namespace for enterprise architecture and/or interoperability frameworks? Would anyone be interested in such? Or, would we reinvent the wheel? I’m sure there is a lot done already here, but there so little sharing. It’s time to change this!
Who’s with me?
The other day I said: “RSS is a melting pot of innovative thinking”. Alan replies: “Pretty soon it could be just a melted pot” with reference to the recent RSS-mess that Jon calls “this most tumultuous of the many tumultuous moments”.
When all is said and done, which seems to be not exactly around the corner, but a definite possibility (it’s not rocket science, guys), I hope that we will have a good XML-based standard format for simple syndication and event notification (blog updates, news, etc.).
RSS is a melting pot of innovative thinking. Jon Udell: “RSS is in no way broken”. Tim Bray talks Mr. Safe into RSS, and gives a bit of background. Jorgen Thelin updates his RSS 2.0 Schema (which should be submitted to ISB).
Perhaps the best news is The EchoProject. It’s goal is to build an open system to syndicate, archive, and edit weblogs. Sam Ruby, who runs the initiative uses a wiki as an open forum for agreeing on a new weblog format (Echo) that is:
Sam has a lot of supporters. I’d sign the list too if I knew how to do so.